Hints of God
Psalm 25
1 Peter 3:15
Good morning, Church. I would encourage you to grab a pen or pencil, a piece of paper because I am a going to give you a list of six things that may come in handy in the days ahead.
Our Psalm this morning is Psalm 25. Even with a casual reading of this Psalm you will notice the name of God is found in almost every verse. In Hebrew two names are used: Elohim, the Strong One, and Jehovah = the great I AM. God pervades not only Psalm 25 but all of the Bible.
If you are not comfortable with the idea of a God, then perhaps the book of Esther is for you. It is the only book in the Bible that does not have the word God in it. God is everywhere in this book. The odd thing is nowhere in the Bible does God set out to prove His existence. And I cannot prove there is a God either. At least not in the way it would stand up in a court of law.
When it really comes down to it, none of us can prove there is a God. We can’t see him, there are no known pictures of him, no legal documents.
It’s not like if I stood before a judge and he said are you married to Muriel. Legal people do ask those kinds of questions. I would be able to produce a document from Edmonton Vital statistics, I would be able to show some old pictures taken in 1967 of a girl in a white dress standing next to me. I would be able to line up four kids and six grandkids that have a family resemblance and carry our DNA.
I can’t do that with God. But do have clues, hints that there is a God. 6 Clues. Get your pens ready because I want to give you 6 clues for the existence of God. The Bible says in 1 Peter 3:15 that we should always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect. So, when someone asks you about God here are 6 hints that God exists.
Each one taken by itself may not be all that convincing but when you put these 6 together, they are very convincing. It’s like the terrible events of 9/11. The first plane may have been an accident but as soon as the second plane hit the south tower everyone knew this was deliberate.
Back 300 years before Christ there lived a man by the name of Plato. Most of you have heard of Plato. To this day he is considered one of the brightest thinkers in all of history. One day he tried to make sense of our crazy world. He used this allegory. We are like a prisoner in cave. Been there all of our life, chained to a rock with our face away from the cave entrance. All we see are shadows and garbled sounds from the outside. That is our reality. Any person in this darkened state, thinks about these shadows, these strange sounds, and says ‘there has to be more to life than these chains, there has to be another reality beyond the walls of this cold cave These shadows, these sounds, mean something. There is more to life then this cold cave.’
This morning very quickly, I want to help us look at the clues of reality beyond the pain, the bondage, the suffering of this present evil world. Here are 6 hints of God.
1. Our fine-tuned Universe. For human life to be possible in our universe there had to be hundreds of things happen exactly the way they did. One cannot be sloppy when putting together a carbon-based life system. If you are making bread and the recipe book says 3 cups of flour and 1 teaspoon of salt you cannot say well it all looks white: let’s put in 2 cups of flour and 1 cup of salt. Good luck with that!
Study after study have shown that our entire universe is fine-tuned for human life. As Christian Scientist Dr. Alister McGrath points out ‘The existence of carbon-based life on earth depends upon a delicate balance of physical and cosmological forces. Were any one of these qualities slightly altered, balance would have been destroyed and life would not have been possible.’
Let me give you one example, just one of many hundreds in our fine-tuned universe. We all know about gravity. The force that keeps us from floating away from the surface of the earth. The force that keeps the sun and the moon in their orbits. If gravity were 1/1000th weaker than it is the universe would have expanded too fast and too far and no galaxies or stars or planets would ever have formed. If the gravity had been 1/1000th stronger than the universe would have collapsed long ago and I wouldn’t be preaching this sermon. Our universe is fine-tuned for life.
2. The second hint for God is Math. Yes, that subject some of you hated in High School: Math. Most everything we know about our universe can be explained with math. Why does mathematics so beautifully describe our universe? Scientists cannot answer that question. Scientists use math every day to explain how things work but they don’t know why math is so reliable.
People of faith are the only ones with a reasonable answer as to why math works. We worship a God who is reasonable, rational, consistent – just like math. Math is one of the languages of God.
3. The third hint of God is our deep and universal longing for justice, truth and goodness. There is within all of us a desire for fair play, for justice, for making things right. Where on earth did that universal idea come from. Every culture, every race, every part of the globe has this sense of right and wrong. India is a Hindu culture, but they know that rape is wrong. It happens there as it does here but still, we know it is wrong and we seek for justice, truth and goodness. Who planted that in the human heart?
4. The fourth hint of God, I want to suggest this morning is the yearning for God that almost every person has. Christian apologists argue that this deep sense of yearning of something transcendent is ultimately because we were created to have fellowship with God. As C. S. Lewis pointed out a generation ago. There is no desire we have that does not have fulfilment. We yearn for drink and there is water. We yearn for food and there are meals. We yearn for sex and there is marriage. We yearn for God because there is a God. Our soul is like an iron needle drawn to the magnetic pole of God.
5. The fifth hint of God is beauty. Most of us are moved by a great mountain range, a glorious sunset, a symphony, a painting, a waterfall. These are signposts not destinations. They point us to the greater beauty of God Almighty.
A couple of years ago when I stepped out of the Wells Gray forest and saw the great falls for the first time I was moved to tears. I was so overwhelmed with the beauty. Drawn to God. The same thing happens to me in art galleries, and concert halls, and watching the sun set along the coast of Mexico.
Perhaps beauty means nothing but then again it might be what C. S. Lewis says is a clue to the meaning of the universe.
6. I have one final clue of God. There are others but let me close with this. Hope. We all have hope. The third chapter of Ecclesiastes says that God has planted eternity in our hearts. No matter how bad things get in this life we have hope that things are going to get better. If not here than someday in the sweet by and by. Saint Augustine speaks of the haunting memory of paradise in all of us that we can ever shake off. Even in the middle of life’s mess we have hope. We know we were made for better things. There is another way of existing. As Joni Mitchell sang back in 1969: We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’.
So, there you have it. Six hints of God. Taken one by one they may not be that strong but taken as a whole they are powerful. They are compelling. Some of these clues concern our observations of the world around us; some of them concern our world of inner experience. I trust you will think about these, tuck them away and when God opens a door for you to share your faith – when someone asks, why do you believe in God you will find this list helpful.
